An artist’s concept of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft during its closest approach to Pluto and Charon on 14 July. This spacecraft is the only successful outcome in a long line of unrealized missions to Pluto. Image Credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (JHUAPL/SwRI)

When a Kansan farmboy-turned-astronomer named Clyde Tombaugh discovered […]

An artist’s depiction of Pluto, as seen from the surface of its largest moon, Charon. Image Credit: NASA, ESA and G. Bacon (STScI)

Three weeks now remain before NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft—launched in January 2006—sweeps past the dwarf world Pluto, its large binary companion Charon, and at least four tiny moons, reaching the climax […]

Twenty-five years ago, yesterday, on 24 April 1990, one of the most important missions in the annals of scientific discovery got underway, with the launch of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. As described in yesterday’s AmericaSpace history article, […]

The Hubble Space Telescope appears to “fly” over Earth as it is photographed during STS-109. Photo Credit: NASA

Today marks 25 years since the launch of the STS-31 mission (Discovery), which lofted the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) into orbit. AmericaSpace continues its tribute to the service life and achievements of HST, which began yesterday […]

IMAX view of the release of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in April 1990. Photo Credit: NASA

While the astronauts aboard Space Shuttle Discovery may not have yet known it, April 24, 1990, was a watershed date not just in spaceflight history, but in human history: STS-31 launched from LC-39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space […]

From HubbleSite: “This collage shows images of six different galaxy clusters taken with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory. The clusters were observed in a study of how dark matter in clusters of galaxies behaves when the clusters collide. Seventy-two large cluster collisions were studied in total. Using visible-light images from Hubble, […]

From HubbleSite: “NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope observed a pair of auroral belts encircling the Jovian moon Ganymede. The belts were observed in ultraviolet light by the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph and are colored blue in this illustration. They are overlaid on a visible-light image of Ganymede taken by NASA’s Galileo orbiter. The locations of […]